We recently connected with Jared Mahone and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jared thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

I have been full-time for over 18 years. In that 18 years, I’ve been able to support myself and my wife and eventually two kids. I’ve always written original music as an exercise of self-expression but by the time I got to college I began teaching myself guitar. Learning this instrument allowed me to easily share my songs with other people in any setting so I started playing this music for friends and family. The feedback from these songs seems positive so I felt confident enough to try them out in public. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to book shows. I learned about open mic nights in my city, signed up, and found a home on these stages. I would attend open mics 4-6 nights a week, staying awake until 2;30 and 3am just for a chance to be on stage for 15 minutes. It was through this experience that I learned that I was able to perform music in a way that connected with a crowd of strangers. I met open mic performers that, while they weren’t all great, they all had something of value to share. For a year I watched and learned even if most often it was learning what not to do on stage. Most of the performers would play original music and I watched them, along with myself, all struggle through the process of trying to find good lyrics and melodies. One of the performers I met was selling CDs after he played. Like, real CDs I would only see in stores. They were shrink wrapped and had a bar code and everything. I must have assumed that albums were only given to artists who deserved them, and I must have thought he wasn’t one of those deserving artists. I was bold enough to ask him how he (of all people) had a CD with his name on it. He basically explained to me the concept of vanity pressing and even though I grew up in a family of musicians who ran an independent band, none of the business of the band was explained to me. So, for me, this was a revelation. I realized that if anyone could get enough money together, they could buy studio time, hire musicians to learn their songs, and make a record. I did exactly that. I painted a few houses to earn money, recorded a 3 song demo, put together a press kit, and booked my first paying shows at local venues. I performed as a 3-piece band for a few years with a couple of talented friends and our impact on those crowds and professionalism with promoters led to higher paying shows, more opportunities for performing better stages, and more money to make better recordings that we were eventually able to sell as merchandise. We built an independent brand around our performing persona and created a line of soft good merchandise in support of that brand. The more I performed solo or with a band, the more contact information I collected from people excited and invested in the shows I was playing and the music I was writing. This contact information became the life blood of my boutique music business as I created personal engagement between those supporters and our brand through email newsletter updates and eventually an online presence. The majority of my business has always been performing live and I find myself now playing a lot of private engagements. But I have also slowly added more passive income streams. I believe I could have sped up this process by embracing social media or other technologies made available to the public like YouTube. At the time, I failed to see those things as anything more than novelties instead of routes of engagement with supporters outside of our personal contact list that eventually could be monetized. I love touring but my family does not and it would be nice to have more streams of revenue that aren’t dependent on me traveling so much.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My grandfather had a deep love for music and raised his kids (my mother and her siblings) to sing together as a family when they were young. My uncle ended up being somewhat of a piano prodigy and they quickly formed a family band recording multiple albums of cover songs they loved from their era. They grew older and eventually began writing together. They would soon produce, record, and perform their own original music that attracted their own modest fanbase that enabled touring and growth. They assembled talented musicians to create dynamic, full band versions of the family act even eventually inviting their spouses into the group and for a number of years ran a decently successful, independent touring/recording band. So I grew up in an environment where it was normal to learn instruments, sing in front of crowds, harmonize, work with sound gear and recording equipment, and write original music. Even though my sister and our cousins grew up the same way I’m the only one of my generation who writes and performs music as a profession. My parents, both with full-time vocations were out of the family group by the time I was three years old when touring became more than just weekends. My cousins lived a lot of their early years on the road with the family band but still, it was I who fell in love with music and latched onto it as my identity. My voice was my instrument for many years and I wrote my first songs in middle and high school with the help of my uncle who is a multi instrumentalist. With my first few songs, he helped me realize the full production of the music in my head by writing the music around my lyric and melodies. Eventually, he left the road behind and moved from the midwest to the West Coast for a full-time music career. With my writing partner gone, I needed a way to continue getting my songs out of my head so I taught myself acoustic guitar and use it most often as my primary writing and performing tool still to this day. I now have my own modest but still growing customer base of supporters who seem to appreciate my own writing and performing. They purchase tickets to live performances, merchandise, and my recorded music. They order custom songs and even host their own private house concerts. I am proudly independent as a brand with no direct affiliations to the corporate side of my industry. I believe this helps me to provide people with music that focuses on substance and culture over escapism or entertainment. I write stories that attempt to connect with the core of people and help connect people to each other. I signed a small, non-exclusive deal with a large booking agency who sets up shows in various markets such as college, corporate, and military, and I operate as my own booking agent for most everything else. I have had small sync placements in television shows over seas, have some notable collaborations, and appeared on national television performing live with my band. It’s been a mostly quiet and manageable career with so much more music to be recorded and released in hopes that these songs too will be accepted by our current but growing crowd and will open up even more opportunities to continue this adventure into the future.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I don’t think this story will be unique in a lot of ways. I’m sure most every creative in America who does some kind of public performing can share a similar tale of resilience in the face of the dark years of Covid. Like many musicians, my main source of income relies on people gathering together. In fact, the entire history of show promotion is someone finding a confined space, determining its capacity for holding as many humans as possible, then booking an attraction and charging a ticket with the hopes of meeting or exceeding that capacity. For the last 100 years, when any promoter talks about a successful event, it’s one that has people shoulder to shoulder, packed in like sardines and glad about the fire marshal not showing up. Because of quarantine and then social distancing, that reality was over for a moment and at the time we all had no idea how long that moment would last. I remember the day I was taking phone call after email from promoters and agents notifying me of cancelations. In one 7 hour period I sat helpless as future gross income disappear from my calendar. Obviously, it could have been much worse. I had friends who lost people close to them. But, in a business sense, it was as bad as it could have been. Not only do I make most of my money playing live shows that no longer existed, I also have a small commercial space with a single room recording studio where I produce music for other artists. So, my next largest stream of income is from clients who also just lost their living. As a small business, I realized that I wasn’t as diversified as I thought and I didn’t really have anything substantial to lean back on. In those first couple days of quarantine, I watched musicians panic, set up phone cameras, and post terrible looking and even worse sounding virtual concerts in exchange for digital tips in an effort to reach people in their homes. If it was possible that virtual concerts might help stave off some of the loses, I was determined to make sure mine were the very best they could be. I realized youtube gamers had been live streaming video and audio for the last decade so spent the next 3 days watching hours of “how to” videos to find out exactly what equipment and applications were being used to broadcast over the internet. As you can imagine, that equipment all of the sudden became hard to acquire. But I got my hands on the least expensive, most effective assortment of gear I could find, set up my rig, and tested and tested and tested until I was confident I could provide a virtual show of the highest quality. Then, I set up some public shows, promoted through social media, and sold digital tickets that gave my fans access to a private viewing location. Those few shows were very successful and allowed me to connect to my crowd all over the country. But the best thing to come of that effort happened after my booking agent caught wind of my virtual set up. He had college campus promoters who were willing to spend money on private, virtual shows for their their students while they were home for the summer. Also, corporate Skype events wanted to include entertainment as a gift to their employees. It turned out, I was one of the only artists on the roster who had built a broadcast rig so quickly. So, I was offered a lot of virtual shows through my agency and my calendar filled back up. While that was great for a short wave, I realized right away that this was not going last. I pictured concert attendees leaning in to their computer screens as I played songs in an empty room to a camera lens. It was very depressing and not how live music was meant to be. Plus, all of the sudden, Taylor Swift and Coldplay were offering virtual concerts. But, no matter who the artist was, I struggled to understand why people would watch any thrown together live virtual event when on that same computer screen they had access to a nearly endless well-produced content. So, I decided I needed to do another quick pivot. The other thing that was happening with live events was socially distanced outdoor shows. Those at least got closer to the right feel and were attracting attendees by the end of that summer. People were willing to gather in the open air even if they had to be 6 feet away from each other. So, as long as the weather was nice, there might be opportunities for paying shows. I live in the midwest and fall was fast approaching. So, I told my wife I had to try and book a tour of shows anywhere the weather was nice, which meant me leaving on a long tour to play in the south and out west. With schools talking about opening the year with at-home learning, she decided we would homeschool our two kids instead and stick together. We sold our house, bought an RV and called it our tour bus, and I played my solo shows all over the country with my family in tow. For 2 and 1/2 years we lived out of that RV, visited 38 states, saw beautiful country together, and made memories to last a lifetime while we kept the business going as a family. It was pretty special.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

For my whole career, I have been focused on creating and supporting music that is more than just content, entertainment, or a product to be consumed. I believe music has a deeper purpose for humanity and is a vital part of culture. There will always been candy coated sugar pop and DJs moving seas of people with hits and remixes, but I do believe the pendulum is swinging back to a moment where music of substance will get a little more shine, even with younger crowds. In the history of our species, music began around the hearth and it’s in those intimate settings where people can have a shared experience that feels more relational. It’s for this reason I have personally leaned in to playing house concerts. These are small but powerful shows in the private homes of music lovers who turn their living rooms into listening rooms where songwriters share songs and stories and give attendees a behind the scenes experience with music. While there is a small but established underground scene of house concert fanatics and promoters who have turned their homes into public venues, I have chosen instead to reach out to my own personal fan base all over the country and empower them to become temporary private house concerts hosts so they can share these events with their friends and neighbors. Anyone can host a house concert if they know what they are doing. And any musician can do the hard work to book a few house concerts a year. But I wanted to really see if I could fine tune the experience for my fans, for their guests, and for myself. I realized house concerts could be a significant part of my financial portfolio as a touring artist if I could automate my efforts, scale my output, and go from booking 15 a year to booking 60. So, I created what I call the “House Concert Kit”. It’s a tool for musicians that is equal parts booking with CRM, another part event link creation, and the most import part, an automated training kit for novice hosts. I’ve been refining it and testing it for years and have successfully scaled house concerts to the point where they have provided me with a new, full-time base salary that allows me to continue to take chances and make investments in other areas as an artist. While the intention is to eventually make it a robust and fully featured piece of web software available by subscription for any musician to use, my partners and I are currently building custom House Concert Kits one at a time as an artist consultant service for musicians who are interested in creating for themselves a revenue stream of new live playing that is both profitable and artistically fulfilling. If you are an artist reading this and want more information about how we can build for you your own House Concert Kit, check out the info at houseconcertkit.com.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jaredmahone.com
• Instagram: jaredmahone
• Facebook: jared.mahone
• Linkedin: jaredmahone
• Twitter: jaredmahone
• Youtube: jaredmahone

Image Credits

@product614